Ticketmaster and Live Nation have destroyed the concert experience. But it didn’t use to be this way. Today, Oasis and Taylor Swift tickets might go for thousands of dollars, but back in 1955, you could see Elvis Presley in concert for less than the modern-day equivalent of $20.
I just go support smaller artists that have below $50 shows
The joy of niche music taste: cheap live tickets to small venues, and cool merch. Multiple times I could have touched their instruments from the floor section.
The pain of niche music taste: Depending upon their genre and your city’s size, they may never come nearby you. New York and LA get everything, Kansas City folk better like country and speed-rap.
I just saw an article about how ticket sales are slumping, and that people aren’t willing to spend 600 per ticket anymore. The poor Ticketmaster CEO said that people just don’t want to.
Yep my dude, can’t be that you’ve changed concerts from “we should go see _______!” To “I guess it’s the one time in my life I’ll ever see them, I’ll go one time and then never again” level of special occasion. Seriously 600 dollars per person is nearing Disney level vacation money.
So yeah, of course money isn’t infinite. You hit the ceiling. Taylor and oasis may gather that much, but your other artists are going to suffer. I’ll be honest I paid 600 for Taylor. It was a once in a lifetime experience. But now they want me to pay something like 400 for any random music act that comes to town. No, Ticketmaster, she was my favorite, that was a one time thing. I’m not paying 400 to see like, Weezer.
The one concert that is on my life long bucket list, for over 40 years, is to see Billy Joel live. He came to my local venue but I did not buy tickets because nose bleeds were over $400 and because I will not do business with Live Nation, period. It makes me sad but resolute.
Edit: For more context, I grew up hearing his music and I remember distinctly driving west on Java from Jakarta to the West coast in 1984 in a little piece of shit Daihatsu van my parents owned (that consistently burnt the bottoms of my feet because the exhaust was so close to the floor) and listening to Billy Joel on an eight track while bouncing and banging around on the awful roads on the way to the beach.
Say it ain’t so!
From what I understand though, this is actually more about people not purchasing albums anymore, so now artists have to basically make the bulk of their money from concerts.
Ticketmaster doesn’t force dynamic pricing for instance; that’s a choice the artist has made in order to maximise their profit from the ticket sales.
I don’t know if the tickets need to be quite as expensive as they are, for artists to make a profit - likely not. But they certainly are making a lot less money from the likes of Spotify than they used to make from albums sales, so it has to be a big part of the problem.
People like Oasis take the piss to be honest, because I doubt they’ve actually run out of money (according to this YouTube channel that was talking about them, they seem to think the brothers both still have plenty of 90s money, I dunno how you check this stuff… but yeah. Makes sense that they shouldn’t have spent it all unless they were really fucking stupid with their investments or lack thereof). So they really don’t need to be making this much money from the ticket sales, but for newer bands the Spotify thing should apply.
They charge as much as they can and have for a long time. They would still do it if they made lots of money from albums and streams.
What’s changed is the secondary market is controlled by the primary ticket sellers and they have better awareness of how much they can charge. People expectation of ticket prices has slowly changed and the prices always push at that.
Dynamic pricing exists now because it’s easier to implement. Not because the artists don’t have enough money.
